This past weekend, I attended SoCon08, an unconference on social networking. During one of the breakout sessions, we outlined the various ways that we as consumers or businesses communicate with businesses. The complete list of communication mediums is below for review.

I found it interesting that as the group shouted out suggestions, it took 4 tries for us to mention email, which is an essential means of communication. I consider email essential because I can safely predict that one of the first things that you do each day in both your work and personal life is check your inbox for new email (well, maybe it’s actually the second thing that you do after sipping your coffee).

This exercise also signaled to me a major shift in way we think about email. Obviously, social networking is leading the charge in the way we think about traditional two-way conversations. But more importantly, I think that the internet continues to play a greater part of our everyday lives and social networking is an incredibly efficient means of communicating when we’re on the internet. In other words, we’re online so social networking allows us to have an online conversation whereas using email feels more like an offline conversation during an online experience.

So am I predicting that the death of email and email marketing?

We’re clearly provided with more opportunities these days to jump on the internet. For example, Starbucks allows you to jump online for free as you sip your latté. We’re also hooked on BlackBerry and iPhone devices to stay connected with colleagues and friends. That means that we’re at the crest of the email “wave”. So in my opinion, email is becoming less relevant as a communication means — instead it is becoming a means to set up to-do lists and archiving. However, I still believe that email will continue to serve a purpose in business communication and this means that the art of crafting, delivering and measuring the response from these emails will become even more important.

Communication Mediums:

• Website (Contact Us Forms)
• Newsletters (Digital and Print)
• Phone
• Email
• Blogs
• Face time
• Instant Messages
• SMS or Text Messages
• Nonverbal
• Networking events

The holidays are upon us and it looks like some folks are getting into the spirit of all things bright and twinkly by adding some of their own twinkle to their emails.

November 19 - AT&T recently sent me an email with a row of phones they were hawking as part of a holiday promotion. Low and behold, an animated .gif for all to see. Twinkle. Suddenly, visions of dancing cell phones in my head.

November 20 - Apple sends me an email announcing their ‘Black Friday’ sale event. For email clients like Outlook that don’t support animated .gifs, the email looked like this. However, in web mail clients like gmail, the animated .gif worked just fine and twinkled like this. (Santa - send me my iPhone)

November 23 - REI sends me this email that speaks to both skiers and snowboarders equally (because really, you’re either one or the other). Double twinkle.

So what does this mean? I’m not sure and would love some feedback on whether the animated .gif is a seasonal special like Starbucks Christmas Blend (my fave) or a new email trend.

If we’re honest about human nature, we gravitate towards ‘blingy’ and ‘blinky’ things, and my eye automatically went after the twinkly things in these emails.

I recently stumbled across this article on how to protect yourself against SPAM. Get this … a study conducted by a company called Nucleus Research revealed that the average cost of SPAM per employee per year is $1,934 - as a result of lost productivity*. While most of us may know what SPAM is by now, and how to defend ourselves from it (for the most part), some of us might not be familiar with its little brother, BACN. 

BACN is pronounced exactly like how you would say those greasy strips that clog up your arteries. This relatively new term, coined at PodCamp Pittsburgh, basically means emails that you actually want, but not right now. Some examples would be your subscribed-to newsletters and online bills. You can read about how it all got started here. Although BACN may not be as detrimental (or as annoying) as SPAM, it has the potential of robbing us of time spent on filtering our email - sorting the messages we really need from those we might never read.

Many of us battling SPAM have some extra help from anti-spam softwares or we use an ISP that provides SPAM protection. As for BACN, the solution may be as easy as thinking twice before signing up for anything online or offline. For example, do you really need that Facebook update when you are already checking your Facebook account for the fifth time today or the other various daily or weekly updates from your favorite stores (who’s websites you frequent anyway), when you are buried up to your neck with work?

So, with some help from SPAM protection software and a little common sense, we can all keep our inbox, and our bottom line, protected from the likes of SPAM and BACN.

Many user experience professionals shy away from marketing.  In many ways, who can blame them?  We’ve observed customers ignore banner ads, watched pop-up ads annoy and confuse customers, and read rants by usability pioneers about the evil that ads wield on web design.  We have seen attempts at applying a traditional “broadcast” model of marketing fail in interactive mediums.

But good marketing is more than ads—a whole lot more. Several concepts in marketing jive quite well with user experience.

Integrated Marketing Communications

Relationship Marketing

Customer Relationship Management

The Good: The Communication Experience Is the Marketing
By emphasizing consistency, customization, and credibility, these concepts echo a few characteristics of what I’ve described as customer-centered communication.  

These concepts additionally

• Lead us to view a customer’s interaction with a brand holistically instead of isolated in certain channels.
• Challenge us to effectively apply customer data such as demographics and buying history to improve communications.
• Encourage us to think about building long-term relationships with customers.

The Potentially Bad: User Experience Opportunities
The potentially bad side of these concepts is, of course, their execution. (Remember those banner ads.)  Here are a few ways user experience professionals can help avoid the bad.

Don’t Interrupt Me: Placement and Content 
Because user experience professionals understand how and why customers actually use the channels, we know when and where marketing communication is most appropriate.  We also can inform its content.

Example: A well-placed, relevant, and undisruptive BP banner ad on CNN.com that engaged even a skeptic like me. It shares a similar topic with the article, visually stands out on the simple page, and expands instead of taking the user away from the page.

Don’t Just Tell Me—Show Me
Telling is reporting that you hiked 25 miles on the Appalachian Trail last weekend.  Showing is describing the weather, the scenery, the sounds, the animals you encountered, the soreness in your muscles.  Telling makes you aware of what happened. Showing engages you in the experience. I think showing is critical to making brand attributes clear and to developing trusting, long-term relationships with customers.  User experience professionals can help brands “show” in interactive mediums.

Example: Betty Crocker has been demonstrating brand attributes such as practical, friendly cooking expertise since the 1920s through recipes, cooking tips, cooking shows, promotions for discounted cookware, and more. (Below is a 1951 print ad with tips and a recipe.) These efforts continue successfully today on the Betty Crocker website and its RSS feeds.

Help Me Help Myself: Applying Customer Data
User experience professionals can make the most of customer data across customer self-service channels and applications such as store kiosks, web applications, automated phone systems, and more. We know how to leverage that data to make self-service customized and therefore more valuable and easier to use. 

Quiet the Noise: Optimizing for Specific Channels
Of course, we can make marketing communications highly usable and accessible in specific channels.

Okay, maybe communication never truly left … but our awareness of it has grown keen as we shape effective customer experiences in interactive media. Recently, Donovan (Director of User Experience) gave a presentation about web 2.0’s impact on the landscape of user (customer) experience.  He convincingly described how web 2.0 capabilities evolved as a response to user needs and allow the web to become, among other things, the communication medium people envisioned 10 years ago.

In this changed landscape of customer experience, what is communication exactly?  How do we ensure customers not only get our messages but also find them relevant and convincing?  How do we coordinate messages across multiple channels to deepen our relationships with customers?

As a start toward answering such questions, I just published “Rediscovering Communication“ for the online magazine UXmatters.  Please add your insights as we journey through this exciting landscape together.

While doing a little research on email marketing, I came across this nifty site called EmailStatCenter.com.  Since I found it to be helpful, I wanted to pass it along to you guys.  This site is the first centralized online repository of statistics and research specific to the email marketing industry, with a broad range of topics included. 

EmailStatCenter.com provides statistical information for those looking for quick facts, but also provides the name of the reports if you’d like to research further.  Let’s face it, if you’re trying to convince people there’s value to an email marketing program, stats will be extremely helpful in your argument.

Here are some facts that I found particularly interesting:

• Of the largest online retailers that send welcome emails, 69% of them send their welcome emails in HTML, while the remaining 31% sent theirs in text-only format. - Email Experience Council/RetailEmail.Blogspot (September 2006)
• 55.3% of marketers surveyed currently use, or plan on using an outside vendor for email marketing. - Datran Media Research, “The 2007 Email Marketing Survey: Looking Forward” (2007)
• 56% of the world’s heaviest online advertisers revealed that they had budgeted significantly for landing-page A/B tests in 2007. -MarketingSherpa (2007)
• The majority of marketers annually allocate less than $250,000 to each of the discrete email functions of acquisition, retention and creative. - JupiterResearch “E-mail Spending and Governance 2007″ (2007)
• U.S. marketers spent $300 million on email in 2005. - 2006 Online Retail Holiday Readiness Report, WebTrends
  

When it comes to words and the web, you may have heard less usually is more. What you may not have heard? How on earth to do it. Here’s the nitty gritty on 4 tactics for content that’s nice and concise.

• Use the Right Subjects and Verbs
  Writing style guru Joseph Williams recommends viewing each sentence as a story. Readers expect main characters to be subjects and their main actions to be verbs. Not only is this structure more clear, it’s also more concise. In the After example below, Spunlogic is the main character.
  Before: There has been a green initiative launched at Spunlogic.
  After: Spunlogic launched a green initiative.
• Don’t Be Redundant, and Don’t Be Redundant
  Spotting redundancy can be fun, and the fix is easy.
  Obvious: Orange in color, period in time
  Implied: Imagine a picture
• Avoid Meaningless Modifiers
  Basically, you really, really want to stay away from virtually all the various modifiers that don’t add meaning. (Translation: Stay away from modifers that don’t add meaning.)
• Why Use a Phrase When a Word Will Do?
  The more carefully you choose your words, the fewer words you have to use. Here’s an example.
  Don’t use this: Due to the fact that
  Use this: Because

You are a marketer. You send a promotional email - time-sensitive, special deal - only to find that the click-through rate was abyssmal. As you begin the witch-hunt for why the message performed so poorly, you discover that Your ESP and their email server are found to be innocent. 

What if your creative piece is responsible? In this age of image-blocking, the importance of email usability is magnified. To illustrate my point, I submit these three samples:

Exhibit A:  The worst case scenario and truly the default view in Outlook 2007 (and the way this email first appeared in my inbox).

Exhibit B: What happens to the email when it is delivered to Outlook 2007 with a common preview pane size and images turned on (today’s lowest common denominator for email software due to it’s MS Word-based rendering engine)

You see who it’s from, but you’ve probably seen other stuff from them.  You’re probably still left thinking, “So what?”

Exhibit C: The designer’s intended creative execution of a promotional email.

Bottom Line:  Send emails designed like this one back to the kitchen every time. Your emails will perform better and you’ll know that you’ve optimized for usability. 

Welcoming the Customer with Communication Done Right
In Part I, I described the challenges large corporations face in communicating effectively with customers throughout the customer lifecycle.  I also showed an example of addressing these challenges through content management only, not communication, in customer support. Well in Part Deux, I’m happy to present an example of meeting these challenges well at the critical “welcome” stage.   

Enter the Cingular Service Summary (CSS).  This document (generic version shown) reaches the hands of every new customer and every customer who upgrades/renews a contract—well over 50 million customers since its release in 2005, about 750,000 customers a day.  This highly personalized, dynamically generated document is printed on the fly in the stores, e-mailed to customers, and posted on the website.  It has two purposes:

• Summarize what the customer bought
• Educate the customer about specific issues and questions (bill amount, voicemail set up, etc.) in an easy-to-understand way.

I toiled to redesign this document during a past life with an excellent team at Cingular Wireless (now AT&T).  I’d like to give it a final salute before it evolves into its AT&T form.  Here are a few reasons why I think the CSS is an example of communication mostly done right:

• Concision – Largely because of the reasons listed below, we reduced the original CSS from 2 pages (front and back) to 1 page (front and back).
• Personalized, relevant information – Thanks to sophisticated technology and complex user scenarios, the content of the document changes depending on the user’s account and transaction type.  Also, we deleted information that didn’t summarize the transaction or educate the customer.
• Clearly organized and prioritized – Like information is consolidated in clearly labeled sections. 
• Polished visual design that clarifies the document’s organization – Clear headers, shading, icons, and more make the document easy to scan, and they clearly convey priority.
• Legalese and technical jargon minimized; plain language maximized - At least as best we could with a service as complex as wireless. 
• A start toward consistent, cross-channel communication – This document appears in e-mail and on the web.  It also served as the basis for redesigning materials sent to customers who order online, over the phone, and through other channels.  

Results? Increased customer satisfaction on industry-wide measures and cost savings from reduced calls to the call center.  Also, in surveys customers reported remembering and keeping the CSS, whereas before they reported not realizing they received one.  The document was such a success that Cingular’s Chief Technology Officer (now the CIO for AT&T) mentioned it in his editorial about customer-driven innovation.  

Doing communication right isn’t always easy, but it pays for everyone.

A few weeks ago I was talking to my insurance agent on the phone and I mentioned that I was going on vacation.  At the end of the call, she said to me “Have a great vacation”.  I automatically replied “You Too!!”… then laughed.  I was so used to hearing someone say “have a great day” or something similar that I reacted first and thought later.  Any of you that are Brian Reagan fans will recognize why I thought this was so funny.  He’s a comedian that does a bit about saying the wrong thing at the right time (audio clip in QuickTime.  Seriously, listen to it – it’s worth it!).  It got me thinking about saying the appropriate thing to the appropriate people.

I’m currently taking classes online at Drexel and they constantly send me emails about ‘on campus’ events and parking passes, an announcement obviously meant for people that live in and around Philadelphia.  It would be so easy to just create a database of people who obviously don’t live in PA and filter out those folks when they send these emails.  All they need is a zip code!  It often baffles me why more companies don’t take the time to clean up their data so they’re not saying something ‘inappropriate’ to their audience.  I’ve started ignoring all emails from Drexel – and every once in a while I miss something important.  But, it’s just not worth my time to have to separate the wheat from the chaff.  Drexel should do that for me – at least to some extent.